Home > Blog

Unfortunately, we didn’t do very much the last couple of days in Paris. Ben had to work, and I … I slept.

On Monday, I went to Notre Dame, which opens at eight. I had the same reaction I did to all the churches we visited in Germany when I was an exchange student: it was pretty, but not all that impressive. It was just a big church. An big, expensive church, one that makes you wonder where they got all that money. But cool nonetheless.

Ben was supposed to call me to let me know where dinner was that night — all the Guidewire folks were going out, and spouses were invited. However, I never got (or heard) the call as I was asleep. I discovered an English Discovery Channel on TV, and I fell asleep for three hours watching it that afternoon. When I woke up, I called Ben, and he said not to bother coming to dinner.

On Tuesday, I ventured to the mall (no pictures) and went shopping. Well, to be truthful, I tried to go to the taxidermy shop first, but it was closed as it wasn’t 10 o’clock yet. As I walked around nearby, I felt lost the same way I did in San Francisco after my first stroke. I was able to find my way around, but it’s a little eerie feeling as if you’re lost in a city where nobody speaks English and you don’t know the laws and don’t know where to go for help or directions.

The mall was really cool. The ENTIRE first floor was dedicated to cosmetics. It was enormous! It was a really interesting layout, too; it was like a department store where you walk in and all the goods are out for you to pick up and try on, but they’re all different merchants. To pay, you take a ticket to the cashier, then come back and pick up your stuff. On the fourth floor, I found a yarn store and bought a couple skeins and a crochet hook to keep myself busy in the hotel room later. It turns out that I just fell asleep, but it was a good idea.

I did make it to the taxidermy shop later that afternoon. I couldn’t figure out what would be so cool about a taxidermy place, but my guidebook listed it as “a hit with kids” and “huge”; I don’t know about the latter, but the former … definitely. They practically had an entire safari in there! A lion, a cheetah, a cougar, a polar bear (OK … you can drop the safari image), and a entomology room full of beautiful butterflies. Dead, but beautiful.

Anyway, then I returned to the hotel and managed to stay awake until Ben called. He had ANOTHER dinner with his Guidewire counterparts from America. GRR. “Please go get yourself something to eat,” Ben pleaded apologetically, so I went to the first cafe I found on the street. I had an omelette, which I couldn’t finish, and a 5.50 euro glass of orange juice. That’s $7.75. It was one of those times when you look at the price after you’ve ordered and do a double take. Anyway, they squeeze the OJ fresh. One and a half oranges (still not worth $7.75!), squeezed dry … it was neat. Pulpy, but neat.

The next day I went shopping again for something that I can’t tell you about until Christmas and then to Guidewire to watch their (pretend) sales presentations. [Edit: I wrote this before Christmas and didn't get to post it until now. It's a neat color-changing lamp and the accompanying French -> American adapter.] Goodness gracious, I didn’t give Ben enough credit; those presentations were BORING. I ducked out after the first one. “I’ll see you tonight for dinner,” Ben promised.

I wasn’t really expecting him to remember, but he appeared at 6:30 and took me to an Italian restaurant. It was fancy and delicious. Also, it was empty. Really, really empty. “How do they stay in business?” we wondered. However, people started arriving at 8:30. Apparently, that’s when the French usually eat dinner. They skip breakfast (since they’re not awake early in the morning), eat lunch, take a two hour siesta, work some more, and then have a late supper. It wouldn’t work for me (I like to eat at 5:30 or 6:00), but …

We awoke early on Thursday morning to catch our plane. We got some breakfast first; a $30 affair in a nearby cafe’, and nobody else was there except a man and his dog. Interestingly, you can bring your dog almost anywhere in Paris, including restaurants. Poor Chaco, left home alone with nothing to eat and only Michael to keep him company ;) This particular dog, a fat chocolate lab, had perfected his begging techinique to a level almost equal to Chaco’s. He didn’t get anything this time, but I imagine that was the exception rather than the rule.

The flights home were uneventful. I stayed awake from Paris to Dulles (in Washington DC), but I was pretty tired when we arrived. OK, honestly I was DEAD tired. I tried to sleep. Then Ben made me get up and move to our gate, which was a madhouse. I tried to sleep some more. It didn’t work. Our plane had been downgraded to a smaller one, so the number of business class seats was smaller and it was a toss-up whether or not we’d get one. (Sorry to be sound so spoiled here. Business class is NICE, though. We got frequent-flier upgrades on this trip so that we flew business class the whole way … oh boy, were they nice!) We did get business class seats, though, and I slept like a baby the whole way home. =) How nice to get back in my bed, though!

On Day 3 (that’d be Sunday the 2nd, for those of you keeping track), we headed to the modern art museum. When we arrived around 9:30, we discovered the museum didn’t open until 11 … those silly French, always sleeping in. When eleven finally rolled around, we at least got in for free because it was Sunday and museums are free on the first Sundays of the month in Paris.

It was actually pretty cool. The first floor of exhibits was actually on the fourth floor of the building, so we took a glass escalator up. There were lots of pictures that looked like somebody spilled paint across a canvas:

And there were some that I considered ridiculous:

There were sculptures and exhibits that took up whole rooms, like this one:

I like abstract art more than traditional art. Despite exhibits like “Three White Canvasses”, I preferred this museum to the Louvre. However, after about two hours in the museum, I was exhausted. I went up to the computer lab (where you couldn’t check your email or do any of the things I wanted to) and sat down while Ben finished the rounds. Then it was a loong walk back to our bed.

Stay tuned for more …

We awoke at 3 am the following day (Saturday), our clocks completely boluxed by the time change. We watched a couple episodes of Heroes on Ben’s laptop before our hunger became priority numero uno. We headed out in search of a restaurant and found … nothing. Absolutely nothing. AND … we kept waiting for the sun to come up, but it didn’t until 8:30. What the heck? It turns out that the French aren’t morning people. They don’t really do anything until 10 am or so. Anyway, we twiddled our thumbs and enjoyed the relative quiet until people actually opened up shop.

That’s another thing about Paris: the traffic noise is horrendous. People keep asking me how France was and I say, “It was noisy,” and then they act all offended. “But it’s PARIS!” they say. “You haven’t had two strokes,” I counter. While the noise kind of makes me feel like I’m having a panic attack (as if I know what that feels like), I never have; I simply get tired. In Paris, rather rapidly. However, Paris was often cloudy, so that made up for about 10% of the road noise. There was one day I even went without sunglasses — an amazing feat for me. (You’ll find me wearing my custom, superdark sunglasses even when it’s cloudy up here.)

(This is just a picture I forgot to post on “Day 1″’s entry. It’s the upside-down glass pyramid at the Louvre.)

After breakfast at a nearby cafe’, we headed to the Eiffel Tower, my one must-see item on our itinerary. I built a lot of towers for Science Olympiad in high school, so this was pretty cool. I wanted to go up in it, but I quickly decided that wasn’t really necessary when I saw the lines. They were LONG. However, we were treated to a neat spectacle underneath the tower: a rescue team was lowering somebody down from the top! It was just a drill (thank goodness!), which is good because I (and presumably other people, too) would’ve been pretty freaked out descending like that.

We explored the surrounding area and rapidly stumbled upon an aquarium. Now, we have pretty high standards for aquariums, since Ben is an aquarium connoisseur, but have you ever been to the Denver aquarium? Except for the tigers, it pretty much sucks. So what the heck, we figured, it’d be fun to see the French fish. Some of the fish were pretty cool — like this puffer fish — and some exhibits were just stupid. For instance, they had a touch tank with an astronaut mural on the wall behind it. Why did they have a space painting on the wall? For the intrepid explorer fish? Who knows. Since most of the captions were in French, it remains a mystery to me.

After our quick aquarium outing, it was time for lunch. I wanted something NOW. Because of my strokes, food is very important to me — protein, in particular, is very important for my energy maintainance. Ben wanted something good. “How about here?” I’d ask, and Ben would reply, “No, let’s keep going a little longer.” We FINALLY found a place that we both agreed on, and it was good, as most of the cafes were. Expensive — as in $20 hamburger expensive — but good.

Then we walked along the road to the Arc de Triumph, which was big but not otherwise particularly noteworthy, and Champs de Lisse, a street famous for it’s shopping. We didn’t buy anything except a little chocolate cake, but we were introduced to a common Parisian sight: the street sweeper. Good God, those things are noisy. They drive up and down the sidewalk picking up leaves (there’s no trash) and they assume that you’ll yield them the right of way. But most of all, they’re LOUD. Thank goodness for earplugs!

After that adventure, we returned to our hotel room and promptly fell asleep. It seemed early, but after waking up at three, I figured I’d earned it. It felt good, and I didn’t wake up until 11 hours later, at … five am. We’re moving in the right direction, at least! Stay tuned for Day 3.

I have a couple random pictures for you. First off, here’s our Christmas tree:

He’s a Frasier Fur, and his name is Francisco. (FYI, we’ve named our fish the same way. The purple tangs are Peter, Paul, Porky, and Princess; the starfish are Sammy and Sandy; the firefish is Frannie; etc. The exception are the yellow Tangs, who are named Tabitha and … I forget. Let’s call them Tabitha, Yolanda, and Yule.)

Also, here is a quilt I just finished! I’m giving it to one of my therapists tomorrow. It looks pretty good from this angle, but I have a couple of concerns. First, the backing: how in the world do you get it to lie flat? Mine is all bunched up. Second, how come my binding is messed up? The corners don’t match up. But, that’s tough, I’m DONE. =)

OK … drumroll please … The moment you’ve all been waiting for! The reason I got my new computer! It’s … MY PICTURES FROM FRANCE!!! OK, maybe it’s not quite as exciting to ya’ll, but deal with it. They’re cool. And I’ve even got more. So stay tuned.

We arrived at Charles De Gaulle airport at five on Friday morning, went to the hotel (which took a long time given the traffic and the one-way streets with garbage trucks on them, but more about that later), and went straight to bed. Ben woke me up at 1:30 pm — and I’m such a pleasure with no sleep, so it was no small feat — and we went on a stroll to the Louvre.

Our visit confirmed my suspicion that I don’t care for art. The paintings they had were all … old. That’s about all I can say for them. The Mona Lisa, which we elected to see because it was in the book “The DaVinci Code” and it’s supposed to be really good, was a disappointment. It’s so small! And you have to stand WAY far back from it!

We also got to see the Venus statue, which, according to Ben (who actually took an art appreciation class in high school – I skipped that one), is very famous. I just got one picture of it, but this illustrates what it was like: there were a gazillion Asian people taking their picture in front of it, with flash, which you’re not allowed to use. (Oops.) From the back, you get a view of her butt crack. One very famous, very expensive butt crack.

Now I would like to take a minute to talk about feet. My feet are a little messed up; on my right foot, my middle toe curves under my pointer toe. It’s not one of my favorite features about myself. If I could change one thing about the way I look, I think that’d be it. But, as my mother told my pediatrician in Tennessee, “It’s not going to affect the way she walks, right? I don’t think I need to tape it straight every night.” So I have a crooked toe. No big deal.

But the toes at the Louvre? They are all PERFECT! The Jesus toes, I can understand:

But ALL the toes on the Greek statues? I find it amazing, and more than a little contrived.

After that, we went to bed. Until about three am the following day. Stay tuned for Day 2!

Yesterday, I had a physical training appointment at Flatirons Athletic Club, ran a couple of errands, then met up with Ben for dinner. I was exhausted from my workout, but he insisted on talking about various things … I can’t even remember what all of them were. One of them was snow tires. This is what our conversation was like:

Ben: … blah-de-blah-de-blah … it was like the guy at Napa who told me that you couldn’t PUT chains on my car … I asked him what the difference between the models was, and he said, “Oh, you’re just paying for the brand. There is no difference.”

Me: Mm-hmm.

Ben: It was then that I knew he was an idiot. You can’t argue with that kind of person.

Me: Mm-hmm.

Ben: Oh, the other thing I wanted to discuss is your computer. I’ve done some research, and I’d like to get you an iMac.

Me: [perking up] Really?

So we went to the Apple Store after dinner, and I’m now the proud new owner of a 20″ iMac. It works beautifully! It doesn’t crash, doesn’t boeing on me (that’s when the fans rev up really fast and loudly), and is generally a well-behaved machine. Of course, I probably jinxed all of that by naming it “Bonzo”, but … well, it hasn’t peed on the floor (yet).

Well, yesterday Ben took me to see the Metropolitan Opera’s “Romeo et Juliet.” The Met is broadcasting their performances live, in HD, to movie theaters all over the world, including our theater in Boulder.

The audience was … old. Of the eight people in the audience without grey hair, I was definitely the youngest. This can join the ranks of “Prairie Home Companion” as a show that Ben has taken me to that are out of my age range. It’s very strange to be in a group of geriatrics. A lot of them got up to use the bathroom in the middle of the show (oh wait … I did that, too!). They were all very nice, though.

I was pretty worried about the opera before we went. I’m not a big fan of operas. I took a course on Mozart in college, and we had to suffer through some pretty terrible ones. However, “Romeo et Juliet” wasn’t that bad! It helped that the singers acted it out. It’s a pretty good play, and that helped. The singers are amazing, though in a way that I don’t particularly care for. I won’t be attending any of the other broadcasts, but one wasn’t so hard.